Alibaba Uyghur Recognition As A Service

Alibaba, the NYSE-listed 'Amazon of China' with a $700 billion+ market cap, openly offers Uyghur/'ethnic minority' recognition as a Cloud service, allowing customers to be alerted any time Alibaba detects a Uyghur.

Watch this 90-second video for an overview:

Uyghur recognition goes beyond China police usage to the country's Internet as the PRC government cracks down on the repressed minority.

Alibaba Cloud quickly deleted mentions of Uyghurs and minority detection on its website after Alibaba was contacted for comment. Alibaba Cloud then claimed, without evidence or explanation, that these features were only used "within a testing environment".

IPVM collaborated on this report with The New York Times which has published its own investigation. Earlier this month, IPVM and The Washington Post revealed that PRC tech giants Huawei and Megvii tested and validated 'Uyghur alarms' in face rec software meant for police video surveillance projects.

Alibaba Cloud Background

Alibaba is China's largest e-commerce firm with ~$78 billion in sales for the latest fiscal year ended March 31st; it is often compared to Amazon and has a well-known founder, Jack Ma, who is currently China's richest person with a net worth of ~$61 billion.

Similar to Amazon's AWS, Alibaba has a huge cloud division called Alibaba Cloud ('Aliyun' in Chinese) which touts "more than 3 million paying customers" worldwide and is China's largest cloud service. Alibaba Cloud reported ~$5.6 billion in sales for fiscal 2020.

Uyghur Detection As A Service

An Alibaba Cloud China's API guide lists "is it Uyghur" (是否是维族) as one of several 'face attributes' it can detect (screenshot via Google Translate):

("Weizu" is a transliteration of 维族 or 'Uyghur ethnicity' in Chinese.)

The API guide, last updated in May 2019, mentions Uyghurs a second time by clarifying that 'minority' detection refers not to minorities in general but specifically to Uyghurs:

Part Of Alibaba 'Cloud Shield' Content Moderation Solution

The API guide says it is part of Alibaba's "Cloud Shield" solution. Alibaba Cloud explains that Cloud Shield "is a pioneer in the field of Content Security", which:

detects and recognizes text, pictures, videos, and voices containing pornography, politics, violent terrorism, advertisements, and spam, and provides verification, marking, custom configuration and other capabilities.

The PRC government strictly censors the domestic Internet, punishing violators, so there is a large and increasingly-AI driven industry of moderation and censorship solutions for private firms.

Alibaba Cloud Offers "Ethnic Minority" Detection

The API guide mentioning Uyghurs is not available when searching Alibaba Cloud's website but is indexed by Google.

Alibaba Cloud's Content Security website directly includes two API guides for "sensitive video facial recognition" that can detect "whether it is an ethnic minority" (是否少数民族); see Synchronous Detection (last updated June 2019) and Asynchronous Detection (last updated November 2020):

While Uyghurs are not explicitly mentioned, as noted, the Cloud Shield API Guide states that "minority (Uyghur)":

Minority Detection Explained

The PRC government has been cracking down on Uyghurs for years and this technology helps that, e.g. if a Uyghur decides to livestream a speech, Alibaba Cloud's AI can automatically recognize a Uyghur face and the video can be flagged for review or removal before it finds a significant audience.

The technology works for any video or pictures with Uyghur faces, so even an anodyne prerecorded video of a Uyghur explaining her first day of university would be flagged if the Alibaba Cloud client had toggled on this feature and it worked as intended.

IPVM could not find any deployment examples of Alibaba Cloud's Uyghur recognition solution. Alibaba owns YouKu, one of China's top video websites, while Alibaba's e-commerce platforms heavily use livestreaming. Weibo, one of China's largest social media apps, also uses Alibaba Cloud.

International Cloud Doesn't Offer Uyghur Detection

Uyghur or ethnic minority detection are not mentioned on Alibaba Cloud's English/global websites, indicating this function is likely only used within China.

Alibaba Deletes Uyghur & Minority Mentions

Soon after IPVM and the New York Times reached out for comment, Alibaba removed the API Guide mentioning Uyghurs, which now reads "sorry, this content is being updated":

Alibaba also removed the "ethnic minority" face detection feature from the two pages mentioning it. For archived versions, see Synchronous Detection and Asynchronous Detection.

Alibaba Claims Only Used for Testing, Without Evidence

Alibaba Cloud claimed the Uyghur recognition was only used "within a testing environment" and was "never used outside" this context:

The ethnicity mention refers to a feature/function that was used within a testing environment during an exploration of our technical capability. It was never used outside the testing environment

Alibaba did not provide any evidence this was a "test" and there are zero mentions of 'tests' in the Alibaba Cloud webpages which include Uyghur/ethnic minority detection. Alibaba also did not explain why it would test Uyghur/ethnic minority detection in the first place.

Kingsoft Also Includes Uyghur Detection

Kingsoft is a separate China cloud services provider and its August 2020 API available on its website includes "Uyghur, non-Uyghur" face detection:

Uyghurs are mentioned again in the API which detects with 48.7% confidence that a sample face is "Uyghur":

Kingsoft recently went public on the NASDAQ this May is currently worth ~$10 billion. The firms calls itself "a leading independent cloud service provider" in China and made about ~$1.2 billion in sales for 2019.

Kingsoft: "Failed To Sufficiently Review" API

Kingsoft deleted this API from its website, saying it was only used to locate faces and "was not able to distinguish or identify individuals of Uyghur background". Kingsoft added "we have failed to sufficiently review the Subject API" which is "being withdrawn" as "labelling on the basis of any race is inappropriate and inconsistent with Kingsoft Cloud’s policies and values".

Below is Kingsoft's full statement:

Subject API was a package of code that only served to help locate a face in a frame of pictures for other developers to then use. It was not image recognition or authentication software. It has never been sold and the whole API program including the Subject API represents negligible revenues for the Company. The Subject API was not able to distinguish or identify individuals of Uyghur background. The labelling on the basis of any race is inappropriate and inconsistent with Kingsoft Cloud’s policies and values. We recognize we have failed to sufficiently review the Subject API. This misleading product is being withdrawn and we will conduct a full review of our API platform and ensure they have appropriate leadership oversight and control mechanisms in place. Our products will never include any attempt to identify and label specific ethnic groups.

Previous Race Analytics Example

While IPVM could not find any examples of firms using Alibaba Cloud's minority analytics, there is one reported example of 'race' detection being deployed by a separate Chinese tech firm. This summer, a foreigner living in China reported that his Chinese wife's Douyin (Chinese Tik Tok) livestream was shut down after his face appeared in her video due to regulations against foreigners appearing on livestreams "without permission":

While it is unknown whether this was from Alibaba, Alibaba Cloud's 'Content Security' does offer "Asian" face detection, allowing a livestreaming firm to be automatically notified if a non-"Asian" face is detected in a video:

Separately, Douyin (Chinese Tik Tok) is known to have deleted videos en masse of Uyghurs protesting PRC government repression, turning the video site into "an all-singing, all-dancing propaganda platform", Coda Story reported, although it is unknown if face analytics were involved.

PRC state news outlet Global Times has reported that some Chinese companies specialize in censoring videos made by ethnic minorities in China, with one such firm stating explicitly that "we usually don't use Uyghur people to moderate their own language content" in order "to avoid trouble".

Conclusion

It has been well documented that China police use Uyghur 'alerts' in their video surveillance systems. Alibaba's offering of this explicitly racist technology to its vast Cloud clientele shows the repression of Uyghurs goes well beyond law enforcement.